Manhood in America

CHAPTER1

TheBirthOfthe Self-MadeMan

Nothing conceivable is so petty, so insipid, so crowded with

paltry interests-in one word, so anti-poetic-as the life of a

man in the United States.

-Alexis de Tocqueville Democracy in America (1832}

0n April 16, 1787, a few weeks before the opening of the Constitu­tional Convention, the first professionally produced play in Amer­ ican history opened in New York. The Contrast, a five-act comedy by Royall Tyler, centered around two men-one, a disingenuous wom­ anizing fop, and the other, a courageous American army officer-and the woman for whose affections they competed.1 Tyler parodied the dandy's pretensions at the same time that he disdained the superfi­ cial vanities of women, contrasting both with an ideal of chaste and noble love. A patriotic play, The Contrast offered a kind of Declara­ tion of Independence of Manners and Morals a decade after the orig­ inal Declaration had spelled out political and economic rights and responsibilities.

The Contrast posed the most challenging question before the newlyindependent nation: What kind of nation were we going to be?

13

14 MANHOOD IN AMERICA

The sharply drawn differences between the two leading male charac­ ters, Billy Dimple and Colonel Manly, allowed the playwright to set (in names worthy of Dickens) the Old World against the New. Dim­ ple was a feminized fop, an Anglophilic, mannered rogue who trav­ eled to England and returned a dandy. "The ruddy youth, who washed his face at the cistern every morning, and swore ... eternal love and constancy, was now metamorphose~ into a flippant, pallid, polite beau, who devotes the morning to his toilet, reads a few pages of Chesterfield's letters [ on the art of seduction], and then minces out to put the infamous principles in practice on every woman he meets. "2 His rival, the virtuous Colonel Manly, is a former military of­ ficer, modeled after George Washington, fresh from the victory over the British-a man loyal to his troops and to honor and duty. Dimple and Manly compete for the hand of Maria, daughter of Mr. Van Rough, a successful urban businessman who is looking to solidify his newly prosperous economic position with a marriage to the well-po­ sitioned Dimple. Van Rough's motto is "Money makes the mare go; keep your eye upon the main chance. "3

While audiences were quick to see the political choices before them-pitting ill-gained wealth and dubious morality against hard work and civic virtue-Tyler was also presenting another contrast, the answer to a different set of questions: What kind of men would populate this new nation? What vision of manhood would be pro­ moted? What would it mean to be a man in the newly independent United States? Dimple, Manly, and Van Rough offered the audience a contrast among three types of men, three versions of manhood; each embodied different relationships to his work, to his family, to his na­ tion. The signal work in the history of American theater is also one of the earliest meditations on American manhood.

When we first meet Maria Van Rough in the play' s opening scene, she is disconsolate, extolling the manly virtues that her fiance, Dim­ ple, lacks:

The manly virtue of courage, that fortitude which steels the heart against the keenest misfortunes, which inteiweaves the laurel of glory amidst the instruments of torture and death, displays something so

THE BIRTH OF THE SELF-MADE MAN 15

noble, so exalted, that in despite of the prejudices of education I can­ not but admire it, even in a savage.

Maria sees Dimple as "a depraved wretch, whose only virtue is a polished exterior; who is actuated by the unmanly ambition of con­ quering the defenseless; whose heart, insensible to the emotions of patriotism, dilates at the plaudits of every unthinking girl; whose lau­ rels are the sighs and tears of the miserable victims of his specious behavior."4

Enter Colonel Manly. When he and Maria meet by accident in the second act, they are smitten, but Manly' s virtue precludes any action on his part. 5 As the play builds to the inevitable confrontation be­ tween Dimple and Manly, Tyler provides brief exchanges between the two men (and their manservants) to maintain the audience's interest. In one exchange they parry over the question of whether aristocratic wealth saps virility. Manly warns that no one "shall convince me that a nation, to become great, must first become dissipated. Luxury is surely the bane of a nation: Luxury! which enervates both soul and body, . . . which renders a people weak at home and accessible to bribery, corruption and force from abroad."

Dimple responds by describing the pleasures of seduction. "There is not much pleasure when a man of the world and a finished co­ quette meet, who perfectly know each other; but how delicious it is to excite the emotions of joy, hope, expectation, and delight in me bosom of a lovely girl who believes every tittle of what you say to be serious!" (We learn later that Dimple's disquisition was more than theoretical, as he has seduced all three of the play' s leading women.) Manly's retort is angry and virtuous. "The man who, under preten­ sions of marriage, can plant thorns in the bosom of an innocent, un­ suspecting girl is more detestable than a common robber, in the same proportion as private violence is more despicable than open force. "6

Finally, Dimple is exposed as a phony and denounced by all. Even in defeat, though, he asks that those assembled consider "the con­ trast between a gentleman who has read Chesterfield and received

the polish of Europe and an unpolished, untravelled American." Manly gets Maria's hand and also has the last word, closing the play

~Q;l

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16 M.ANHOOD IN AMERICA

with what he has learned, that "probity, virtue, honour, though they should not have received the polish of Europe, will secure to an hon­ est American the good graces of his fair countrywomen. "7

Maria's father, Mr. Van Rough, presents still another masculine ar­ chetype; indeed, each of the three-Dimple, Manly, and Van Rough-embodies one of the three dominant ideals of American manhood available at the tum of the nineteenth century. 8 Despite the play' s focus on the other two, it is Van Rough who would come to dominate the new country in a new century. Dimple represents what I will call the Genteel Patriarch. Though Tyler's critical characteriza­ tion sets Dimple out as a flamboyant fop, the Genteel Patriarch was a powerful ideal through the early part of the nineteenth century. It was, of course, an ideal inherited from Europe. At his best, the Gen­ ~eel Patriarch represents a dignified a~tocratic ~anhood, committ~d to the British upper-class codeof honor and to well-rounded charac- ter, with exquisite tastes and manners and refined sensibilities. To the

,~Genteel Patriarch, manhood meant property ownership and a bene~ olent patriarchal authority at home, including the moral instructio.n oihIS sons. A Christian entleman, the Genteel Patriarch embodied love, kin ness, duty, and compassion, exhibited through philan-- thropic work, church activities, and deep involvement with his f!..m- ily. For an illustration of the Genteel Patriarch, think of Thomas._ Jefferson at Monticello, George Washington, John Adams, or James M~dison. -

Colonel Manly embodies a second type of manhood-the Heroic Artisan.9 This archetype was also inherited from Europe, despite Royall Tyler's attempt to Americanize him. ~pdepen~ent, virtuous, and hon­ est, the Heroic · stiffl formal in his manners with women, stalwart and lo al to his male comrades. On the famil farm or in h. urban era-ts shop, he was an honest toiler, unafraid of hard wor prou of his craftsmanship and self-reliance. With a leather apron cov-~ ering his open shirt and his sleeves rolled up, Boston silversmith Paul Revere, standing proudly at his forge, well illustrates this type.

The newcomer to this scene is Mr. Van Rough, the wealthy entre­ preneur, whose newly acquired financial fortune leads to his social aspirations of marrying his daughter to the well-placed aristocratic Dimple. VanRough represents the Self-Made Man, a model of man-

THE BIRTH OF THE SELF-MADE MAN 17

h~d- that derives identity entirely from a man's activities in the pub- r,1-P,,., 1 ei.~

lie sphere, measured by accumulated wealth and status, by geo- ltii.ct+, graphic and social mobility. At the time, this economic fonune would have to be translated into permanent ~ocial standing-Van Rough must try to become Mr. Smooth. Since a man's fonune is as easily unmade as it is made, the Self-Made Man is uncomfortably linked to the volatile marketplace, and he depends upon continued mobility. Of course, Self-Made Men were not unique to America; as the natural outcome of capitalist economic life, they were known as nouveaux richesin revolutionary France (and also known as noblesse de robe, as well as other, less pleasant, terms, in the preceding century), and they had their counterparts in every European country. But in Amer- ica, the land of immigrants and democratic ideals, the land without hereditary titles, they were present from the start, and they came to dominate much sooner than in Europe.

In the growing commercial and, soon, industrial society of the newly independent America, the Self-Made Man seemed to be born at the same time as his country. A man on the go, he was, as one lawyer put it in 1838, "made for action, and the bustling scenes of moving life, and not the poetry or romance of existence." 10 Mobile, c?mpetitive, aggressive in business, the Self-Made Man was also tern- & Ifht~~ peramentally restless, chronicall insecure, and desperate to achieve 11¼.c:t.., a so i grounding for a masculine identity. ·

Royall Tyler hoped that the republican virtue of the Heroic Artisan would triumph over the foppish Genteel Patriarch, just as democratic America defeated the aristocratic British. But it was not to be: It was the relatively minor character, Van Rough, who would emerge tri­ umphant in the nineteenth century, and the mobility and insecurity of the Self-Made Man came to dominate the American definition of manhood.

This book is the story of American manhood-how it has changed over time and yet how certain principles have remained the same. I believe some of its most important characteristics owe their existence to the timing of the Revolution-the emergence of the Self-Made Men at that time and their great success in the new American democ­ racy have a lot to do with what it is that defines a "real" man even today.

18 MANHOOD IN AMERICA

Let's look at the Self-Made Man's first appearance on the historical stage, which will help us limn the shifts in the definitions of man­ hood in the first half of the nineteenth century. An old standard rooted in the life of the community and the qualities of a man's char­ acter gave way to a new standard based on individual achievement, a shift in emphasis "from seIVice to community and cultivation of the spirit to improvement of the individual and concern with his body. "11

From a doctrine of "usefulness" and "seIVice" to the preoccupation with the "sel(" American manhood got off to a somewhat disturbing start.

Part of this start, the American Revolution, brought a revolt of the sons against the father-in this case, the Sons of Liberty against Fa­ ther England.12 And this introduced a new source of tension in the act of resolving an old one. The relatively casual coexistence of the Genteel Patriarch and the Heroic Artisan had been made possible by the colonies' relationship with England. Many Genteel Patriarchs looked to England not just for political and economic props but also for cultural prescriptions for behavior. Patriarchs had the right to lead their country by virtue of their title. The American colonies had few noblemen, like Sir William Randolph, but they had plenty of substi-

. tutes, from upper-class political elites to Dutch landed gentry in New York and the large plantation owners in Virginia and around Chesa­ peake Bay. There was little tension between them and the laborers who worked for or near them. The real problem was that as long as the colonies remained in British hands, it seemed to all that manly autonomy and self-control were impossible. Being a man meant being in charge of one's own life, liberty, and property.

Being a man meant also not being a boy. A man was independent, self-controlled, responsible; a boy was dependent, irresponsible, and lacked control. And language reflected these ideas. The term man­ hoodwas synonymous with "adulthood." Just as black slaves were "boys," the white colonists felt enslaved by the English father, infan­ tilized, and thus emasculated.

The American Revolution resolved this tension because, in the te~ oft~ei i~ meta hor of the da , it freed the sons from th~ tyrann of a Declaration of In e en ence was a declaration of manly adulthood, a manhood that was counterposed

I

THE BIRTH OF THE SELF-MADE MAN 19

to the British version against which American men were revoltin . Jefferson and his coauthors accuse the king of dissolving their repre­ sentative assemblies because they had opposed "with manly firm- - ~

ness, his invasions on the rights of the people." (Of course, th~ rebellion of the sons did not eliminate the need for patriarchal au­ th~rity. George Washington was immediately hailed as the Father of our Country, and many wished he would become king.)

By contrast, British manhood and, by extension, aristocratic con­ ceptions of manhood (which would soon come to include the Gen­ teel Patriarch) were denounced as feminized, lacking manly resolve and virtue, and therefore, ruling arbitrarily. Critiques of monarchy and aristocracy were tainted with a critique of aristocratic luxury as effeminate.John Adams posed the question about how to prevent the creation of a new aristocracy in a letter to Thomas Jefferson in De­ cember 1819. "Will you tell me how to prevent riches becoming the effects of temperance and industry? Will you tell me how to prevent riches from producing luxury? Will you tell me how to prevent lux­ ury from producing effeminacy, intoxication, extravagance, vice and folly?"13

Works of fiction and essays exploited the Lockean theme of Amer­ ica as the state of nature in which individual morality could emerge, a contrast between virtue born of nature and vice born of luxury and refinement. In the preface to Edgar Huntley, the first work of fiction written by an American specifically about the American experience, novelist Charles Brockden Brown claimed that he had replaced the "puerile superstitions and exploded manner, Gothic castles and

· chimeras" of the European novel with "the incidents of Indian hostil­ ity and the perils of the Western wilderness." And Washington Irving echoed these themes a few decades later, writing that "[w] e send our youth abroad to grow luxurious and effeminate in Europe; it appears to me, that a previous tour on the Prairies would be more likely to produce that manliness, simplicity and self-dependence, most in uni­ son with our political institutions." !!,1politics and in culture, in b_Q$.h fi£tion and fact, American men faced a choice between effeminacy_ a?1d manliness, between aristocra~x and repuhHcanism.~4

To retrieve their manhood from its British guardians, the Sons of Liberty carried out a symbolic patricide. "Having left the British

20 MANHOOD IN AMERICA

parent as a child, America miraculously becomes capable of its own nurturing; independence transforms the son into his own parent, a child into an adult. "15 The American man was now free to invent himself. The birth of the nation was also the birth of a New Man, who, as Hector St. John de Crevecoeur put it in his marvelous Let­ ters from an American Farmer (1782), "leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank he holds. The American is a new man who acts upon new principles .... Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men. "16

At first, the American new man at the tum of the nineteenth cen­ tury cautiously tried to fit in, either as a Genteel Patriarch, Heroic Ar­ tisan, or even Van Roughian Self-Made Man. In the early American magazines, for example, heroism was defined by a man's usefulness and service, his recognition of responsibilities. Between 1810 and 1820, the term breadwinnerwas coined to denote this responsible family man. The breadwinner ideal would remain one of the. central characteristics of American manhood until the present day. At its mo­ ment of origin, it meant that a man's "great aim" was "to fill his sta­ tion with dignity, and to be useful to his fell ow beings"; in another magazine, a man's death was lamentable because of "his desire of usefulness-his wish to be one of those by whom society is enlight­ ened and made better." 17

This is well illustrated in The Farmer's Friend, an advice book writ­ ten by the Reverend Enos Hitchcock in 1793. In recounting the story of the well-named Charles Worthy, Hitchcock describes the Heroic Artisan as young farmer and recounts his gradual rise as he diligently pursues his calling. Worthy, Hitchcock writes, "never felt so happy as when conscious of industriously following his occupation .... In order to merit the esteem of others, we must become acquainted with the duties of our particular professions, occupations, or stations in life, and discharge the duties of them in the most useful and agree­ able manner." Virtue inheres in the work virtuously performed, the calling followed, not in the financial rewards that accrue to the virtu­ ous worker. Ben]amin Franklin, perhaps the first American prototype of the Self-Made Man, underscored this theme. "In order to secure

THE BIRTH OF THE SELF-MADE MAN 21

my credit and character as a tradesman," he wrote in his Autobiogra­ phy,first published in 1 791, "I took care not only to be in realityin­ dustrious and frugal, but to avoid all appearances to the contrary." To Franklin, as to many other early Self-Made Men, image may not have

been everything, but it was of importance. 18

But patricide has significant costs, including the loneliness of the

fatherless son and the burden of adult responsibilities placed upon .

his shoulders. 19 American men's chief fear at the time was that the Jt::,Jin£i overthrown effeminate aristocracy would return to haunt them. ~~ r-s' Samuel Adams articulated this fear in an article in the Massachusettsl€4r-Gj Sentinelin January 1785. "Did we consult the history of Athens and

1 '1dv(~l

Rome, we should find that so long as they continued their frugality

and simplicity of manners, they shone with superlative glory; but no

sooner were effeminate refinements introduced amongst them, than

they visibly fell from whatever was elevated and magnanimous, and

became feeble and timid, dependent, slavish and false." In other words, aristocratic luxury and effeminacy threatened the Revolution's

moral edge. The post-Revolutionary American man had to be con-

stantly vigilant against such temptation, eternally distancing himself

from feminized indulgence. 20

A few years later, Benjamin Rush saw the threat to the newly

emerging republican manhood as coming from both sides-from ef­

feminate aristocrats as well as from lazy laborers. In his '½.ddress to

the Ministers of the Gospel of Every Denomination in the United

States upon Subjects Interesting to Morals" (1788), Rush advocated

that American men tum themselves into "republican machines." He

called for the elimination of fairs, racehorses, cockfighting, and clubs

of all kinds, argued that all forms of play be banned on Sundays, and

that all intoxicating spirits, including liquor and wine, the "parents of

idleness and extravagance," be prohibited. But Adams and Rush, like Royall Tyler, were wrong. Neither effemi­

nate aristocrats nor lazy laborers were the real threats. Billy Dimple's time was slowly passing, and Colonel Manly could never be as domi­

nant as Cincinnatus. Instead, the economic boom of the new coun­

try's first decades produced the triumph of the Self-Made Men, the

Van Roughs, men who were neither aristocratic fops nor virtuous

drones-far from it. These Self-Made Men built America.

22 MANHOOD IN AMERICA

Between 1800 and 1840 the United States experienced a market revolution. Freed from colonial dependence, mercantile capitalism remade the nation. America undertook the construction of a national transportation system and developed extensive overseas and domes­ tic commerce. Between 1793 and 1807 American exports tripled, while between 1800 and 1840 the total amount of free labor outside the farm sector rose from 17 to 3 7 percent. 21 The fiscal and banking system expanded rapidly; from eighty-nine banks in 1811 to 246 five years later and 788 by 1837. The economic boom meant westward expansion as well as dramatic urban growth.

Such dramatic economic changes were accompanied by political, social, and ideological shifts. Historian Nancy Cott notes that the pe­ riod 1780-1830 witnessed a demographic transition to modem pat­ terns of childbirth and childcare, development of uniform legal codes and procedures, expansion of primary education, the beginning of the democratization of the political process, and the "invention of a new language of political and social thought." Democracy was ex­ panding, and with it, by the end of the first half of the century, Amer­ ica was "converted to acquisitiveness," a conversion that would have dramatic consequences for the meanings of manhood in industrializ­ ing America. In the third decade of the century, between 1825 and 1835, a bourgeoisie worthy of the name came into being in the Northeast, a self-consciously self-made middle class.22

The emerging capitalist market in the early nineteenth century both freed individual men and destabilized them. No longer were men bound to the land, to their estates, to Mother England, or to the tyrannical father, King George. No longer did their manhood rest on their craft traditions, guild memberships, or participation in the vir­ tuous republic of the New England small town. America was entering

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a new age, and men were free to create their own destinies, to find --- +--

th~ own ways, to rise as high as they could, to write their own bi- o~aphies. God had made man a "moral free agent," acfording to re­ vivalist minister Charles Finney in a celebrated sermon in 1830. The American Adam could fashion himself in his own image. This ~ew in­ dividual freedom was as socially and psychologically unsettling as it was exciting and promising. To derive one's identity, and especially

\

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THE BIRTH OF THE SELF-MADE MAN 23

one's identity as a man, from marketplace successes was a risky proposition.

Yet that is precisely what defined the - n · success in the mar et, individual achievement, mobility, wealth. America ex- s.df--n-,4 pressed political autonomy; the Self-Made Man embodied economic Vl-Jq"'

._

autonomy.This was the manhood of the rising middle class. The flip side of this economic autonom is anxie , restlessness ess. Man ood is no longer fixed in land or small-scale property owner­ ship or dutiful service. Success must be earned, manhood must be proved-and proved constantly.

Contemporary observers of early nineteenth century American life noticed the shift immediately. One of the most popular tracts of the 1830s was Thomas Hunt's The Book of Wealth (1836), which went through several printings while proving to its readers that the Bible mandates that men strive for wealth. "No man can be obedient to God'swill as revealed in the Bible without, as the general result, be­ coming wealthy," Hunt wrote. The drive for wealth penetrated every­ thing. "Nearly all Americans trade and speculate," observed Thomas Nichols in 1837. "They are ready to swap horses, swap watches, swap farms; and to buy and sell anything .... Money is the habitual measure of all things." One English traveler in 1844 remarked that Americansused the phrase "I calculate" as a synonym for "I believe" or "I think." "Things are in the saddle, and ride mankind," quipped Ralph Waldo Emerson in an 1847 ode, which commented on the re­ versal of priorities encouraged by the emerging capitalist market. 23

In the early republic, as today, equal opportunity meant equal op­ portunity to either succeed or to fail. "True republicanism requires that every man shall have an equal chance-that every man shall be free to become as unequal as he can," was the way one advice man­ ual, How to Behave, expressed it. "Some are sinking, others rising, others balancing, some gradually ascending toward the top, others flaminglyleading down," wrote a young Daniel Webster. In his 1837 book TheAmericans,Francis Grund commented on the "endless striving,"the "great scramble in which all are troubled and none are satisfied."'t\ man, in America, is not despised for being poor in the outset ... but every year which passes, without adding to his pros-

24 MANHOOD IN AMERICA

peritfi is a reproach to his understanding of industry" and, he might have added, a stain on his sense of manliness. 24

The contrast with European manhood was a constant theme, and one that European observers noted with special relish. The French­ man Michel Chevalier wrote, after a visit to Jacksonian America, of its "universal instability." "Here is all circulation, motion, and boiling agitation. . . . Men change their houses, their climate, their trade, their laws, their officers, their constitutions. "25 Even after ten years as a resident of Boston, the Viennese immigrant Francis Grund still couldn't figure it out:

There is probably no people on earth with whom business constitutes

pleasure, and industry amusement, in an equal degree with the inhabi­

tants of the United States of America. Active participation is not only

the principal source of their happiness, and the foundation of their na­

tional greatness, but they are absolutely wretched without it. ... Busi­

ness is the very soul of an American: he pursues it, not as a means of

procuring for himself and his family the necessary comforts of life, but

as the fountain of all human felicity.26

The acclaimed British novelist Charles Dickens expected to be de­ lighted when he visited the United States in 1842 but found himself increasingly disappointed with the American people both for their self-congratulatory myopia and defensiveness and for their energy and restlessness.As he chronicled in his rambling work American Notes for General Circulation (1842), Dickens was awestruck in this "great emporium of commerce" as much by the "national love of trade" as by the "universal distrust" that accompanied it, which Americans "carry into every transaction of public life." Dickens told the American people,

It has rendered you so fickle, and so given to change, that your incon­

stancy has passed into a proverb; for you no sooner set up an ideal

finnly, than you are sure to pull it down and dash it into fragments:

and this, because directly you reward a benefactor, or a public servant,

you distrust him, merely because he is rewarded; and immediately

apply yourselves to find out, either that you have been too bountiful in

your acknowledgements, or he remiss in his deserts. 27

THE BIRTH OF THE SELF-MADE MAN 25

Dickens found Americans "dull and gloomy," without either joy or

humor, and found himself "oppressed by the prevailing seriousness

and melancholy air of business" among these strange people, "rest­

less and locomotive, with an irresistible desire for change. "28

The era's most perceptive visitor-perhaps the most observant

visitor in our history-was a young French nobleman, Alexis de

Tocqueville. When Tocqueville arrived in America in 1830, he was

instantly struck by the dramatically different temperament of the

American, a difference he attributed to the difference between aris­

tocracies and democracies. Unlike his European counterpart,

Tocqueville observed, the American man was a radical democrat­

equal and alone, masterless and separate, autonomous and defense­

less against the tyranny of the majority. Each citizen was equal, and

"equally impotent, poor and isolated." In Europe caste distinctions between nobles and commoners froze social positions but also con­

nected them; "aristocracy links everybody, from peasant to king, in one long chain." Democracy meant freedom but disconnection; it "breaks the chain and frees every link." American democracy also meant a great sliding towards the center; all Americans tended to "contract the ways of thinking of the manufacturing and trading

classes. "29

Tocqueville's dissection of the double-edged quality of the demo­ cratic personality remains as incisive today as it was in the early nine­

teenth century. The middle-class man was an anxious achiever,

constantly striving, casting his eyes neivously about as he tried, as Mr. Van Rough put it in The Contrast, to "mind the main chance." The American man was "restless in the midst of abundance." In a

passage that eloquently defines this restlessness of the Self-Made Man, Tocqueville writes:

An American will build a house in which to pass his old age and sell it before the roof is on; he will plant a garden and rent it just as the trees are coming into bearing; he will clear a field and leave others to reap the harvest; he will take up a profession and leave it, settle in one place and soon go off elsewhere with his changing desires. . . . [H]e will travel five hundred miles in a few days as a distraction from his happiness.3o

26 MANHOOD IN AMERICA

Like Dickens, Tocqueville also found the American marked by a "strange melancholy"; every American "is eaten up with a longing to rise, but hardly any of them seem to entertain very great hopes or to aim very high." The American man was a man in a hurry but with not very far to go.31

Even the term self-made man was an American neologism, first ~

coined by Henry Cla in a s eech in the U.S. Senate in 1832. De- feri mg a protective tariff that he believed would widen opportunities for humble men to rise in business, he declared that in Kentucky "al­ most every manufactory known to me is in the hands of enterprising, self-made men, who have whatever wealth they possess by patient and diligent labor. "32

The term immediately caught on. Rev. Calvin Colton noted in 1844 that America "is a country where men start from a humble ori­ gin, and from small beginnings gradually rise in the world, as the re­ ward of merit and industry. . . . One has as good a chance as anothe~ according to his talents, prudence, and personal exertions .... [T]his is a country of self-made men [in which] work is held in the highest respect [while] the idle, lazy, poor man gets little pity in his poverty."33 By the 1840s and 1850s a veritable cult of the Self-Made Man had appeared, as young men devoured popular biographies and inspirational homilies to help future self-made men create themselves. John Frost's Self Made Men in America (1848), Charles Seymore's Self-Made Men (1858) and Freeman Hunt's Worth and Wealth (1856) and Lives of American Merchants (1858) provided self-making homi­ lies, packaged between brief biographies of poor boys who had made it rich.

The central characteristic of being self-made was that the proving ground was the public sphere, specifically the workplace. And the workplace was a man's world (and a native-born white man's world at that). If manhood could be proved, it had to be proved in the eyes of other men. From the early• nineteenth century until the present day, most of men's relentless efforts to prove their manhood contain this core element of homosociality. From fathers and boyhood friends to our teachers, coworkers, and bosses, it is the evaluative eyes of other men that are always upon us, watching, judging. It was in this regime of scrutiny that such men were tested. "Every man you meet

THE BIRTH OF THE SELF-MADE MAN 27

has a rating or an estimate of himself which he never loses or for­ gets," wrote Kenneth Wayne in his popular tum-of-the-century ad­ vice book, Building the Young Man (1912). 'i\ man has his own rating, and instantly he lays it alongside of the other man." Almost a century late~ another man remarked to psychologist Sam Osherson that "[b)y the time you're an adult, it's easy to think you're always in competi­ tion with men, for the attention of women, in sports, at work. "34

In the early decades of the nineteenth century, the Self-Made Man

competed with the two other archetypes from Tyler's play. The Gen­ teel Patriarch had to be displaced, and the Heroic Artisan had to be uprooted and brought into the new industrial marketplace. In the rush of the new century, Self-Made Men did indeed triumph, but nei­

ther the patriarch nor the laborer disappeared overnight. First, the Genteel Patriarch. While the richest tenth of all Ameri­

cans held slightly less (49.6°1o)than half the wealth in 1774, they

held 73 percent in 1860, and the richest 1 percent more than dou­ bled their share of the wealth, from 12.6 to 29 percent, and then to

about 50 percent by mid-century. The period 1820-1860 was "prob­ ably the most unequal period in American history. "35 But these new wealthy were no longer the landed aristocracy but the new merchants and industrialists. 36 Economically, Van Rough simply blew away Billy

Dimple. American culture followed suit. Gone were the powder, wigs, and

richly ornamented and colorfully patterned clothing that had marked

the old gentry; the new man of commerce wore plain and simple

clothing "to impan trust and confidence in business affairs. "37

Countless pundits recast the Genteel Patriarch as a foppish dandy as

they railed against Europe, against traditional feudal society, against

historical obligation. 38 Even older, venerated Genteel Patriarchs were

not immune to the feminization of the landed gentry. Jefferson him­

self was castigated as dandified, the product of aristocratic and

chivalric Virginia, 'i\rnerica's Athens." He was accused of "timidity,

whimsicalness," "a wavering of disposition" and a weakness for flat­

tery,a man who "took counsel in his feelings and imagination," and the Jeffersonians were condemned for their "womanish resentment"

against England and their "womanish attachment to France. "39

A" ~ ~.}A (set'. /~~

28 MANHOOD IN AMERICA

Leading the charge against the Genteel Patriarch was Ralph Waldo Emerson, who signaled the shifting taste in his seminal essay "!he... A!perican Scholar" (1837). Emerson "enshrined psychic self-sover­ eignty as the CSSential manly virtue," according to literary critic I Walter Herbert, and the theme of his essays "of self-reliant struggle from humble origins to high position became the ruling narrative of manly worth, supplanting that of the well-born lad demonstrating his superior breeding in the exercise of responsibilities that were his birthright. "40 Nathaniel Hawthorne even suggested that a young man could be crippled by inheriting "a great fortune." Here was a "race of non-producers," warned S. C. Allen in 1830, a "new sort of aristoc­ racy, of a more uncompromising character than the feudal, or any landed aristocracy can ever be. "41

Such efforts were not altogether successful, but certainly indicated a trend. Even in the mid-nineteenth century cultural observers vener­ ated a "romantic consumptiveness" as the preferred male body type-composed of a thin physique, pale complexion and languid air. (Muscular bodies were snubbed as artisanal, a sign of a laborer.) 'i\.n American exquisite must not measure more than 24 inches round the chest; his face must be pale, thin and long; and he must be spindle-shanked," wrote the venerable observer Francis Grund in 1839. "There is nothing our women dislike so much as corpulency; weak and refined are synonymous." (Even then there was a differ­ ence between a manhood constructed for women's approval and the masculinity of a man's man.)~~ was in the Old South where the Gen- teel Patriarch made his last stand, at least until the Civil War, While ~uthem manhood was increasingly caricatured as effeminate ~d

tigie was passing. Meanwhile, the Heroic Artisan was losing his independence,

which he so dearly prized. He "looks the whole world in the face/ Forhe owes not any man," as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow put it in "The Village Blacksmith" (1844). 42 Disciplined and responsible, the Heroic Artisan believed that "independent men of relatively small means were both entitled to full citizenship and best equipped to ex­ ercise it." A firm believer in self-government, the Heroic Artisan was the embodiment of Jeffersonian liberty; the virtuous "yeoman of the

o.~~ dandified in the Northern press, even in the South the old cavalie0

THE BIRTH OF THE SELF-MADE MAN 29

city," as he had called them. Before the Civil War nine of every ten American men owned their own farm, s op, or sma era wor -- re,, '--'

f:i shop: About half of all workmen were employed in sho s of ten or

(A

c:-.'1....

fewer; our- ths worked in shops of no more than twen . His body was 15 own, IS a or a orm of prope!!)'. 43

The independence of the Heroic Artisan did not mean that he was isolated, reclusive, nor on the other hand, overly competitive; both in his daily interactions in the workplace and as he strolled through the city or town, the Heroic Artisan saw himself as deeply embedded within a community of equals, a "shirtless democracy," in the words of Mike Walsh. On the occasion of the dedication of the Apprentice's Library in 1820, Thomas Mercein said that "[e]very man looks with independent equality in the face of his neighbor; those are exalted whose superior virtues entitle them to confidence; they are revered as legislators, obeyed as magistrates, but still considered as equals." One bit of verse used equality before God as another foundation for political equality:

Of rich and poor the difference what?­ In working or in working not Why then on Sunday we're as great Asthose who own some vast estate.

Sure, the Heroic Artisan wanted to get ahead in the market, and he was not immune to its rewards or temptations. Even Tocqueville re­ marked that the craftsman's goal was not "to manufacture as well as possible" but to "produce with great rapidity many imperfect com­ modities." But he was just as determined to retain his independence and protect the independence of the community of equals in the re­ public of virtue. 44

The cement of this republican virtue was the coupling of economic autonomy to political community and workplace solidarity. This combination is the essence of producerism,an ideology that claimed that virtue came from the hard work of those who produce the

world'swealth. Producerism held that there was a deep-rooted con­ flict in society between the producing and the nonproducing classes and that work was a source of moral instruction, economic success,

andpolitical virtue. "Weask that every man become an independent

30 MANHOOD IN AMERICA

proprietor, possessing enough of the goods of this world, to be able by his own moderate industry to provide for the wants of his body," wrote Orestes Brownson in his tract "The Laboring Classes" (1840). The doctrines of producerism resurface constantly through the cen­ tury as rural and urban workingmen, from the Populists to the Knights of Labor and early union organizers, cast their resistance to proletarianization in terms of preservation of economic autonomy and political community. 45

The British historian E. P.Thompson's explorations of the emer­ gence of the British working class revealed an easy flow between the workplace and leisure ~n the British villages of the pre-Industrial Rev­ olution, even in the actual length and organization of the working day.46 In their workshops, apprentices, journeymen, and master craftsmen integrated work and leisure. Customers would appear, contract for specific tasks, and socialize and wait while it was being done; when no customers appeared, masters and journeymen would continue to train young apprentices while jugs of hard cider were constantly passed around. At leisure the Heroic Artisan was commu­ nitarian, participating regularly in "evenings of drink, merriment, and ceremony that were part of longstanding premodern traditions" and that provided ample opportunities for artisans to meet in a mood of "mutual self-esteem and exaltation. "47

Workplace solidarity and ease of movement between work and leisure also spilled over into the organization of the trades. Many trades resembled fraternal orders in which artisans developed modest welfare systems for their sick and needy brethren or for the families of deceased brethren. Each volunteer fire department, for example, was its own fraternal society with its own insignias, mottoes, "freshly minted traditions," "fiercely masculine rituals," and sacred emblems like the fire hose, company crest, and fire chief's trumpet. 48

These independent artisans, craftsmen, and small shopkeepers were on the defensive throughout the first half of the century; Each of the periodic economic crises had struck these artisans especially hard. Older skills became obsolete and factory employment grew­ from an average of eight women and men to anywhere between fifty and five hundred men. 49 Masters increased the scale, pace, and rou ..

THE BIRTH OF THE SELF-MADE MAN 31

tine of production, hiring young strangers, with whom they shared only contractual relations, rather than the sons of their neighbors.so Real wages of skilled workers declined, and workplace autonomy seemed to be disappearing everywhere. New fo;rms of labor control,_

il}cluding the putting-out system, sweated labor, and wages, all eroded the virtuous republic. _ ·

In Philadelphia in 1819, three of four workers were idle, and

nearly two thousand were jailed for unpaid debts. By 1836 ten major

strikes hit the skilled trades, and convulsive strikes took place on the

waterfront and the building sites. In June of that year, thirty thousand men showed up for a demonstration in New York, the single largest

protest gathering in American history to that point. Also in New York

six thousand masons and carpenters were discharged in April 183 7 alone. 51

The sons of the Sons of Liberty were fast becoming, as they put it

in a letter of protest to President John Tyler, "mere machines of labor." Ironically, the same experiences that cemented their solidarity

and underscored their autonomy now left them isolated and defen­

sive. While, politically, democracy had "hastened the destruction of onerous forms of personal subordination to masters, landlords, and

creditors that American working people had historically faced,"

writes the labor historian David Montgomery, it also left them unpro­

tected from unscrupulous masters and conniving employers and dis­

connected from others who shared a similar fate. 52

Many workingmen tried to combat this trend by organizing the na­

tion's first workingmen's political parties, there to redress their eco­

nomic and political grievances in parties like the Mechanics Union of

lrade Associations (1827), the Workingmen's Party (1828), and the

Equal Rights Party (1833). These organizations' rhetoric was satu­

rated with equations of autonomy and manhood. _boss of autonomy was e uated with emasculation; economic dependence on wa es J vb paid by an employer was equivalent to socia an sexua dependency.

T e factory system was "subversive o 1 erty, accor ing to one ·

worker in the fledgling National Trades Union in 1834, "calculated to

change the character of a people from bold and free to eneivated, de­

pendent and slavish." Under such circumstances, held an editorialist

32 MANHOOD IN AMERICA

in the union newspaper TheMan, it would have been "unmanly" and undignified, "an abdication of their responsibilities as citizens"if they did not organize.53

~wspapers like TheMan inveighed regularly against three 2roul1t women, immigrants, and black slaves. Women had earlier been ex­ cfi1ded (of course) from craft guilds and apprenticeships, but the emerging working class supported women's complete exclusion from the public sphere, even though only around 2 percent of all females

-J~ over the age of ten worked in any type of industry. These fonnerly inde­ pendent small shopkeepers and craftsmen opposed women's rights to education, property ownership, and suffrage. 54 It was as if workplace manhood could only be retained if the workplace had only men in it.

And only native-born men at that. Immigration had increased rapidly through the first half of the century, from 140,439 in the 1820s to 599,125 in the 1830s. During the 1840s immigration more than tripled to 1,713,251, and 2,598,214 more immigrants arrived

~\ during the 1850s. Anti-immigrant demonstrations and riots followed ,A" as the native-born artisans felt increasingly threatened by these less- ~ skilled workers, who were willing to work longer hours for lower

wages.55 In antebellum America Irish immigrants were especially stamped with a problematic masculinity. Imagined as rough and primitive, uncivilized and uncivilizable, the Irish were ridiculed as a subhuman species, born to inferiority and incapable of being true American men. 56

Of course, not all native-born men were real men. In an arresting book the historian David Roediger argues that, from the moment of its origins, the white working class used black slaves as the economic and moral "other," whose economic dependency indicated emascula­ tion and moral degeneracy. Whiteness, Roediger argues, served as a secondary "wage'' for white workers who were resisting the view of wage labor as a form of wage slavery. B assertin their whiteness,

._. ~~rkers could compensate for their loss of autonomy; the "status _\._N,c;)a~d privileges conferred by race could be used to make up for abt-

" .~ W - i~g and exploitative class relationships. "57

What Roediger describes economically, social historian Eric Lott discusses symbolically in his analysis of blackface minstrel shows in antebellum America. Minstrel shows perfonned a double mimesis;

THE BIRTH OF THE SELF-MADE MAN 33

the minstrel show was, Lott argues, both love and theft. The projec­ tion of white men's fears onto black men was simultaneously for "whites insecure about their whiteness" and for men insecure about their manhood. "Mediating white men's relations with other white men, minstrel acts certainly made currency out of the black man himselL" he writes. The "pale gaze" of the white audience faced with a caricatured black identity paralleled the "male gaze" of this now conscious audience of men reasserting their manhood through the symbolic appropriation of the black man's sexual potency. 58

In these literal and symbolic ways the American working class that emerged in the decades before the Civil War was self-consciously white, native-born, and male, rooted as much in racism, sexism, and xenophobia as in craft pride and workplace autonomy-a combina­ tion that has haunted its efforts to retrieve its lost dignity and orga nize successfully against industrial capitalists throughout American history. The rage of the dying class of Heroic Artisans took manr. forms.

In the 1830s, however, something remarkable happened. The work­ ing class saw its salvation in the presidential campaign of one of its own. Andrew Jackson was both the last gasp of Jeffersonian republi­ can virtue and the first expression of the politics of class-based re­ sentment.

Andrew Jackson was not the first American leader to combine viru­ lent hypermasculinity with vengeful, punitive political maneuvers nor, certainly, was he (nor will he be) the last. But he was one of the most colorful and charismatic of such, and he embodied the hopes and fears of many men. The emotions that seem to have animated Jacksonian America were fear and rage. When Jackson first arrived in the Senate, he was unable to speak because of "the rashness of his feelings," then-Vice President Thomas Jefferson recalled. "I have seen him attempt it repeatedly and as often choke with rage." A "cho­ leric, impetuous" man, according to tum-of-the-century historian FrederickJackson Turner, Jackson was a "tall, lank, uncouth-looking personage, with long locks of hair hanging over his face and a cue [ponytail] down his back tied in an eel skin; his dress singular, his manners those of a rough backwoodsman. "59

34 MANHOOD IN AMERICA

~

It is difficult not to see Jackson and the men he stood for in starkly

Freudian terms. Here was the fatherless son, struggling without guid­

ance to separate from the mother and, again, for adult mastery over

his environment. Terrified of infantilization, of infantile dependency,

his rage propelled the furious effort to prove his manhood against

those who threatened it, notably women and infantilized "others." It

was as if America found an adolescent leader to preside over its own adolescence as a nation. Here was "the nursling of the wilds," a

"pupil of the wilderness," according to George Bancroft; a man, as Tocqueville put it, "of violent character and middling capacities." An-

. drew Jackson was the consummate schoolyard bully.60

The hero of the War of 1812 and the Creek War of 1813/14, Jack­ son saw his military exploits as an effort to overcome his own "indo­

lence" and achieve republican purification through violence. He

came to power as the champion of the Heroic Artisan, whether rural

yeoman farmer or urban artisan, against the effete aristocracy of the

Eastern urban entrepreneur and the decadent Europeanized landed

gentry. One laudatory biography of Jackson from 1820 began with alarm over the "voluptuousness and effeminacy" that was attendant

upon the sudden rise of new wealth in America, characteristics that

were "rapidly diminishing that exalted sense of national glory. "61

The Heroic Artisans embraced Jackson. He campaigned in 1828, in the words of a campaign song, as one "who can fight" against John

Quincy Adams, "who can write," pitting "the plowman" against "the

professor. "62 As president his hostility towards paper currency, his opposition to corporate charters, his deep suspicion of public enter­

prise and public debt-all elements of American producerism-ap­

pealed to small planters, farmers, mechanics, and laborers, the "bone

and sinew of the country." His administration was saturated with the

rhetoric of the violent, short-tempered, impulsively democratic arti­

sanate, especially in his struggle against the savage nature of primi­

tive manhood (Indians) and the effete, decadent institutions that

signaled Europeanized overcivilization (the Bank).

In his brilliant, psychoanalytically informed biography and cul­ tural history of Jackson and his historical era, Michael Rogin focuses .on these twin peaks of the Jacksonian landscape. Jackson

he I ia

ro·ected

his own and the nation's fears of dependency onto

THE BIRTH OF THE SELF-MADE MAN 35

'Yere cast as the passive,helpless children that the HeroicArtisan was..lhd, 4115

attempting to avoid becoming. A simple pattern emerged: Appropri- JS'FtJ'~"'v., ate their land and abridge their freedom because you see them as ~A passive and helpless. This makes them passive and helpless, which

then allows you to justify the whole thing by referring to the passivity and helplessness you have just caused.

It was as if, by making these independent Indian tribes dependent upon the benevolent paternalism of a centralizing state, white arti­

sans and farmers could avoid becoming dependent. "Like a kind fa­

ther," James Gadsden said to the Seminoles in Florida, "the President

says to you, there are lands enough for both his white and his red

children. His white are strong, and might exterminate his red, but he

will not permit them. He will preserve his red children." And Jackson

told three chiefs that the bad counsel they had heeded "compelled your Father the President to send his white children to chastise and

subdue you, and thereby giye peace to his children both red and

white." Now, Jackson continued, it was necessary for the Indians to

come under the President's care, where "your Father the President

may be enabled to extend to you his fatherly care and assistance." No

sooner had the sons of liberty thrown off their own tyrannical monar­

chical father than they set themselves up as the benevolent fathers

they had never had and, tragically, were utterly unable to become. 63

If the Indian symbolized the savage brute transformed into a help­

less dependent child, the Bank symbolized the devouring mother

from whose grasp the adolescent nation was trying to escape. The

"Mother Bank," was a "monster Hydra," a "hydra of corruption," as

Jackson himself put it, and it became a symbol of corporate power­

paper money, monopoly privilege, complex credit-that turned men

from "the sober pursuits of honest industry." The Bank represented

centralized economic and political power, which threatened to over­

whelm the virtue of the republic. If the Bank was able to consolidate

credit, control a single paper currency, and control all business trans­

actions, the independence of the Heroic Artisan would be compro­

mised, and he would be returned to helpless childhood dependency.

As Vice President Martin Van Buren warned, the Bank would "pro­ duce throughout society a chain of dependence ... in preference to

the manlyvirtues that give dignity to human nature, a cravingdesir

36 MANHOOD IN AMERICA

for luxurious enjoyment and sudden wealth [and] substitute for re­

publican simplicity and economical habits a sickly appetite for effem­

inate indulgence." The freeborn sons of liberty would be turned into

the dependent daughters of the Mother Bank.64

· Jackson's flight from feminizing influences illustrates a psychody­

namic element in the historical construction of American manhood.

Having killed the tyrannical father, American men feared being swal­ lowed whole by an infantilizing and insatiable mother-voluptuous,

voracious, and terrifyingly alluring. Jackson projected those emotions

onto "others" so that by annihilating or controlling them, his own

temptations to suckle helplessly at the breast of indolence and luxury

could be purged. Jackson's gendered rage at weakness, feminizing

luxury, and sensuous pleasure resonated for a generation of symboli­

cally fatherless sons, the first generation of American men born after

the Revolution.

Historically, such flight from feminization produced its opposite as the Heroic Artisan became wedded to exclusionary policie~ that left

him increasingly defenseless against unscrupulous capitalist entre­

preneurs, just as Jackson's effort to reconcile simple yeoman values

with the free pursuit of economic interest ultimately cleared the path

for the expansion of laissez-faire capitalist development. The heroic

resistance of the artisan against the feminizing Bank was ironically

the mechanism by which he was eventually pushed aside and trans­

formed into a proletarian.

That process was begun in the 1830s but by no means quickly

completed. In the presidential campaign of 1836, Jackson had

picked his vice president, Martin Van Buren, as his successor to con­

tinue the struggle against the forces of feminization and proletarian­

ization. The son of an innkeeper, Van Buren was praised by Jackson

as "frank, open, candid, and manly ... able and prudent." But after one term in office, Van Buren was outmasculinized in the campaign

of 1840 by his Whig opposition as they seized upon the very senti­

ments that Jackson and Van Buren had aroused. The rhetoric of that

campaign, which pitted William Henry Harrison, the hero of

Tippecanoe, against Van Buren, was a political masterpiece of gen ..

dered speech. Harrison's manly virtues and log cabin birth werecon­ trasted with Van Buren' s ruffled shirts and his cabinet com po ed of

THE BIRTH OF THE SELF-MADE MAN 37

"eastern officeholder pimps." In a sense, the presidential campaign

of 1840 was the first-but certainly not the last-national presiden­ tial campaign characterized by dirty tricks, race-baiting, and the pro­

motion of form over substance, and it continued the great American tradition of using manhood as political currency. 65

Rather than articulate Harrison's position on specific issues, the

Whigs chose to denigrate his opponent and promote their man by

attaching to him two symbols of the Heroic Artisan: the log cabin,

symbolizing the humble birth of a self-made man of the people­

Harrison was labeled the Cincinnatus of the West-and the hard

cider jug, symbolizing his alliance with the traditional artisanal work

world and his opposition to the new discipline of the market. Im­

ages of log cabins were everywhere-"hung on watches, earrings, in

parlor pictures and shop windows, mounted on wheels, decorated

with coonskins, and hauled in magnificent parades. "66

The chief task for the Whigs was to dissociate Van Buren from his

predecessor. Congressman Charles Ogle's speech, "The Regal Splen­

dor of the Presidential Palace," delivered in April 1840, signaled the

beginning of perhaps the most gendered rhetorical barrage in the his­

tory of American politics. Ogle freely mixed gender and class in his

effort to discredit Van Buren. In vain imitation of European aristo­

cratic tastes, Ogle observed, the president's table was not "provided

with those old and unfashionable dishes hog and hominy, fried meat and grary, schnitz, kneop and sourcrout with a mug of hard cider." In­ stead, Van Buren's "French cooks" furnished the president's table in

"massive gold plate and French sterling silver services." Van Buren

was, moreover, the first president who insisted upon "the pleasures

of the warm or tepid bath." Perhaps most shocking was Ogle's con­

tention that a recent appropriation of $3,665 for alterations and re­

pairs to the President's home "may be expended in the erection of a

thronewithin the 'Blue Elliptical Saloon' [the Oval Office] and for the purchase of a crown, diadem, sceptre and royal jewels" so that this president, "although deprived of the title of royalty, will be invested, not only with its prerogativesbut with its trappingsalso. "67

The tone for the campaign was set, and pundits quickly fell into

step. The LouisvilleJournalreported that when Van Buren read this outrageous attack, "he actually burst his corset." Davy Crockett penned

38 MANHOOD IN AMERICA

an incendiary faux biography of Van Buren, damning the President as traveling in "an English coach" with liveried "English servants." "He is laced up in corsets, such as women in town wear, and, if possible, tighter than the best of them," wrote Crockett, so that "[i] t would be difficultto say from his personal appearance, whether he was man or woman, but for his large redand graywhiskers."68

As the log cabin dwellers and drinkers of hard cider campaigned against "Vanocracy," they sang newly penned campaign songs. (This campaign marked the political songbook' s first appearance.) Like the journalists, songwriters went after his physical appearance and his manner and style, chastising "little Van" as a "used up man," a man "who wore corsets, put cologne on his whiskers, slept on French beds, rode in a British coach, and ate from golden spoons from silver plates when he sat down to dine in the White House." According to the song lyrics, Van Buren "had no taste for fighting" but adored "scheming" and "intrigue."69 Of Harrison, by contrast, they sang:

No ruffled shirt, no silken hose

No airs does TIP display

But like the "pith of worth" he goes In homespun "hoddin-grey."

Upon his board there ne'er appeared

The costly "sparkling wine"

But plain "hard cider" such as sheered

In days of old lang syne.

The strategy paid off handsomely, sending an incumbent to defeat for only the third time in American history. Over 80 percent of the eligi­ ble white male voters turned out for the election-a turnout rarely, if ever, equaled before or since. ~nd it set a dubious precedent: Sine~ ~840 the. president's manhood has always been a question, his manly resolve, firmness, courage, and power equated with the capac­ ity for vio ence, mi itary VIrtues, an· a p a1n-1V1ng sty e t at avoi ed culti at . · re ement. and civi i9'.

The campaign of 1840 had a sad, if well-known, coda. Harrison ap­ parently believed his own hype. Taking the oath of office on one of the

THE BIRTH OF THE SELF-MADE MAN 39

most bitterly cold days on record in Washington, Harrison refused to wear a topcoat lest he appear weak and unmanly. He caught pneumo­ nia as a result, was immediately bedridden, and died one month later-the shortest term in office of any president in our history.

But gender had become political currency, and subsequent cam­ paigns continued to trade in manly rhetoric. Of Zachary Taylor, Old Rough and Ready, for example, it was said that his education on the frontier had developed his manly character, while Taylor's supporters castigated his opponent, Lewis Cass, for his service as Jackson's am­ bassador to France. Cass was a "common man" if ever there was one-the son of a New Hampshire blacksmith who had fought in the Revolution, he rose to fame as a soldier and frontiersman, fought the British at Detroit, and made peace with the Indians. 70 Yet even he could be smeared by the association with France. In the following election, General Winfield Scott attempted to "clothe military aris­ tocracy in frontier buckskin. "71 By 1860 one newspaper chastised James Buchanan for his "shrill, almost female voice, and wholly beardless cheeks," while the bearded and deep voiced Abraham Lin­ coln parlayed his plain-spoken humble origins into a national myth of probity, economy, and virtue that come from a log cabin president.72 Our president could never be some Europeanized dandy . who dreamed" of aristocracy or monarchy; he would, for many years, claim the mantle of the artisanate, a descendent of the agrarian yeo-

....._

man farmer. .. In the last decade before the outbreak of Civil War, it was still un­

clear which model of manhood would emerge as triumphant. Already the Heroic Artisans were in retreat though they still exerted signifi­ cant influence in local urban politics. And though Genteel Patriarchs had been discredited politically, at least as a political symbol, they still controlled a significant proportion of the nation's property. Their decline and the Self-Made Man's ascendancy were still in question, as was made abundantly clear in a shocking series of events that took placein May 1849. As with Royall Tyler's The Contrast, the stage was set, literally, in the New York City theater. Or rather in the Opera House at Astor Place and the surrounding square and city streets.

In May the celebrated British actor William Macready was prepar­ ing to perform Macbethat the tony Astor Place Opera House. At the

40 MANHOOD IN AMERICA

same time, Edwin Forrest, perhaps the most acclaimed American

actor of his era, was taking up theatrical residence at the Broadway

Theater for a run of his own. What might have begun as a personal

squabble between the two premier actors of their respective countries

turned into a clash between the patriotic, xenophobic nationalism of

the New York working classes and the contemptuous elitism of the

powerful. To the emerging urban elite, the working classes were noth­

ing but gutter rabble, "sanguinary ruffians," filthy and uncouth;

those same workingmen branded the bankers and merchants as "the

dandies of Uppertendom. "73

The actors themselves had squared off before. Macready was

pompous, elegant, and extraordinarily gifted; an "actor autocrat," ac­

cording to one critic. Forrest was a man of the people, "born in hum­

ble life," who "worked his way up from poverty and obscurity." In

short, the man hailed as "the American Tragedian" was a self-made

man; and as the Boston Mail put it in 1848:

he is justly entitled to that honor-he has acquired it by his own

labors; from a poor boy in a circus he has arisen to be a man of fame

and wealth, all of which he has lastingly gained by enterprise and tal­ ent, and secured both by economy and temperance. 74

Stylistically and sartorially, the two men were as different as a leather­

aproned artisan and a liveried aristocrat. When Macready played

Hamlet, one critic obseived, he "wore a dress, the waist of which

nearly reached his arms; a hat with a sable plume big enough to

cover a hearse; a pair of black silk gloves, much too large for him; a ballet shirt of straw coloured satin," which, combined with his angu­ lar facial features, made him appear "positively hideous." Forrest's rugged appearance and muscular acting style stood in sharp contrast; Forrest had, in the words of one London reviewer, "shot up like the wild mountain pine and prairie sycamore, amid the free life and spontaneous growths of the west, not rolled in the garden-bed of cities to a dead level, nor clipped of all proportion by too careful hus­ bandry." The two actors captured the contrast of national cultures and of versions of manhood, pitting, as one critic put it, "the unso­ phisticated energy of the daring child of nature" against the "more glossy polish of the artificial European civilian. "75

THE BIRTH OF THE SELF-MADE MAN 41

The two played their parts superbly. Neither especially liked the other, either as an actor or as a man. Macready was struck by the "ve­

hemence and rude force" of Forrest's performances, which favorable

critics attributed to Forrest's manly vigor and oracular power. Macready was criticized as a "high-hatted" player, "craven-hearted,

egotistical, cold, selfish, inflated," and obsessed with his "aristocratic importance. "76 Forrest had earlier hissed at Macready' s performance

of Hamletostensibly because the Englishman, castigated as a "super­ annuated driveller," had tinkered with the play somewhat, introduc­

ing into one scene a "fancy dance" that was excoriated by Forrest as a

"pas de mouchoir--dancing and throwing up his handkerchief

across the stage. "

When Macready and Forrest were each booked to perform in

New York in May 1849, both stages were set for an explosive con­ frontation. The opening night performance of Macready's Macbeth was punctuated by noisy demonstrations and efforts by the rowdy throngs in the balconies to disrupt the performance. Tossing rotten eggs, "pennies, ,;lnd other missiles" and eventually throwing a few

chairs, they succeeded iIJ.driving Macready from the stage of that "aristocratic, kid.:.glove Opera House. "77 Disgusted, the stalwart

English actor determined to cancel his performances and sail the next night for England_. The plebeian crowds were jubilant in their

assumed victory. The next day, though, Macready changed his mind

after being entreated by several New York notables, including bankers, merchants, and writers like Washington Irving and Her­

man Melville. The next night, May 10, thousands of workingmen and young

working-class teenagers, lmown colloquially as B'hoys and renowned

for their "virtuous contempt" for all things aristocratic, gathered in

front of the Opera House. 78 Ned Buntline, the organizer of the infa­ mous nativist organizations the United Sons of America and the Pa­ triotic Order of Sons of America, whipped the "mobbish nativism" of

the crowds to a fever pitch; the group now intended to prevent the performance or at least to disrupt its conclusion. Meanwhile the New

York City police, joined by the local battalions of the state militia,

were determined to keep the enormous crowd in check. By the end of the performance, as the crowds were whisked away via side exits

42 MANHOOD IN AMERICA

tempers were flaring. There was the expected shouting back and forth and even a few projectiles launched in the direction of the po­ lice and soldiers. Suddenly and unexpectedly the soldiers opened fire on the crowd. Twenty-two were killed, thirty more wounded, and over sixty more arrested. 79

The Astor Place riot marked the first time in American history that American troops had ever opened fire on American citizens. To some it signaled the beginning of the great class struggle. A year after Marx and Engels had published The Communist Manifesto in Germany, one eyewitness saw the Astor Place riots in these terms:

[I]t was the rich against the poor-the aristocracy against the people;

and this hatred of wealth and privilege is increasing all over the world,

and ready to burst out whenever there is the slightest occasion. The

rich and well bred are too apt to despise the poor and ignorant; and they must not think it strange if they are hated in retum. 80

Those killed and arrested were all local artisans or small shopkeepers, including pFinters, clerks, grocers, ship joiners, butchers, plumbers, sailmakers, carpenters, and gunsmiths. 81 And their opponents were the newly moneyed urban entrepreneurs, flexing their political mus­ cles, able to harness military and police power for their side and able to fend off efforts to taint them as aristocratic dandies.

!t had taken scarcely tiveoty years for the Self-Made Man to estab- \o;lish a foothold in the consciousness of American men and to stake a

c!_aim for dominance in American politics and culture. He had gone from being the new kid on the block to owning the street. Avoiding ~e taint of aristocracy and subduing the working classes, the Self­ M~e Man was now, at mid-century, the dominant Ame~ concep­ tiQ!l of manhood. And in the decades following the Civil War, he would transform the nation.